the allegory of yeats's 'the wanderings of oisin

Colby Quarterly Colby Quarterly

Volume 15 Issue 2 June Article 7

June 1979

The Allegory of Yeats's "The Wanderings of Oisin" The Allegory of Yeats's "The Wanderings of Oisin"

Michael J. Sidnell

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The Allegory of Yeats's"The Wanderings of Oisin"

by MICHAEL J. SIDNELL

I N THE 1899 edition of Poems, Yeats moved "The Wanderings ofOisin" from the front of the book to the back. 1 Reviewers, he

thought, concentrated on the poem merely because it came first,neglecting the rest. 2 The effect of this transposition probably exceededits aim since critics henceforward tended to treat Yeats's longest poemas an appendix to the Collected Poems.

Since the appearance over thirty years ago of Alspach's study of someof the sources of the poem 3 there has been no extended examination ofany aspect of "Oisin"; and this despite what seems to be a general renewal of interest in Yeats's early work. A monograph on Yeats's development up to 1900 offers us the assurance that "Alspach's record ofdirect borrowings does not substantiate a charge of plagiarism," 4 abizarre comment which has the virtue of getting us nowhere, by contrastwith some psychoanalytical comments on some details of the poemwhich take ·us altogether too far. One such is the suggestion that thedemon of the second book may be "orgasm incarnate"5 which, whatever truth there may be in it, suggests a reduction whereby Yeats'sdemon and, say, Moby Dick become indistinguishable. More usefullyand characteristically, commentary on the poem directs attention to itsstyle (' 'pre-raphaelite," 6 "heavily lacquered," 7 "the poetic diction ofWardour Street" 8) and to the influence of Shelley, Keats, Tennyson andMorris. 9

As for interpreting the allegory of the poem, I suppose that the chiefarguments against interpretation would be: that the allegory is obvious;that the allegory is too obscure; that even convincing interpretation, ifnot unnecessary, would be self-defeating in that it would demonstrate

1. Allan Wade, Bibliography of the Writings of W. B. Yeats, 3rd. edn., rev. and ed. Russell K. Alspach (London, 1968), pp. 35-39, items 15 and 19.

2. Allan Wade, ed., The Letters of W. B. Yeats (London, 1954), p. 786.3. Russell K. Alspach, "Some Sources of Yeats's The Wanderings of Oisin, " PMLA, LVII (Septem-

ber 1943), 849-866.4. Harold Orel, The Development of William Butler Yeats: 1885-1900 (Lawrence, Kan., 1968), p. 14.5. Morton Seiden, "A Psychoanalytical Essay on W. B. Yeats," Accent, Spring 1946, pp. 178-90.6. T. S. Eliot, "Yeats," in On Poetry and Poets (New York, 1957), p. 302.7. Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (New York, 1948; repr. 1958), p. 137.8. T. R. Henn, The Lonely Tower, 2nd edn. (London, 1965), p. 112.9. See, for example, Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of W. B. Yeats (London, 1941), pp. 44, 47, 63-64,

74. Peter Faulkner in his William Morris and W. B. Yeats (Dublin, 1962), p. 9, dissents from the typicalview of the influence of Morris on "Oisin."

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Sidnell: The Allegory of Yeats's "The Wanderings of Oisin"

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Colby Quarterly, Vol. 15, Iss. 2 [1979], Art. 7


MICHAEL J. SIDNELL 139

that the poem was in the intrinsically uninteresting and inferior allegorical mode. Yeats himself, though his earliest efforts were a succession ofallegories, held a theoretical objection to them as part of his inheritancefrom Blake. He was careful to distinguish, however, between works inwhich "allegory and symbolism melt into one another" and "allegorywithout symbolism." 10 And Yeats's distinction holds good for "Oisin,"in which the symbolism (of sun and moon, for example) liberates thepoem from allegorical particularity. Indeed, the tendency in the poem toproceed very rapidly from the allegorical figure to the "symbol of aninfinite emotion" 11 is the source of a good deal of its obscurity. Butneither this tendency nor the functions of the symbols themselves can beseen in isolation from the allegorical basis of the poem.

Only Ellmann has pursued in any detail the outline that Yeats gave onseveral occasions:

Oisin led by the noseThrough three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose. 12

The terms of "The Circus Animals' Desertion" are close to those Yeatsused, shortly after the first publication of the poem, in a letter to Katherine Tynan. Having earlier and unnecessarily warned her against tryingto penetrate, in the second part of the poem, the "disguise of symbolism" to which he only had "the keY,"l3 he now lamented and hinted:" 'Oisin' needs an interpreter. There are three incompatible things whichman is always seeking-infinite feeling, infinite battle, infinitereposehence the three islands. " 14 The hint is slight enough, offering no clues todetails within this allegorical structure, to the connection betweenFenian Ireland and the three islands, or to the relationship of the bodyof the poem to the dialogues of Oisin and Patrick at its beginning andend. All of these elements require the attention of an interpreter; so doesthe considerable accumulation of image and symbol in the poem thatYeats was to use over and again in later works. Interpretation of"Oisin" is, moreover, an examination of the laborious imaginative andintellectual foundation of many later works: "the swordsman throughout repudiates the saint, but not without vacillation. Is that perhaps thesole theme-Usheen and Patrick? ... "15 Oisin's quest goes throughmany metamorphoses in Yeats's poetry and always with the same result.The poet mounts and re-mounts the Olympian colt but some weakness,be it of pride, indignation or solicitude, always brings him down to

10. "The Symbolism of Painting" (1898), reprinted in Essays and Introductions (London, 1961), p.148.

11. Ibid., p. 149.12. "The Circus Animals' Desertion," Collected Poems (London, 1950), p. 391.13. Letters of w. B. Yeats, p. 88.14. Ibid., p. 111.15. Ibid., p. 798.

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140 COLBY LIBRARY QUARTERLY

earth again. It takes a lifetime to learn to obey the ordinance that Oisindisastrously ignores, "Horseman pass by!"

As a narrative, "The Wanderings of Oisin" is circular in form. Theend of the story joins its beginning in the arc of the dialogue of Oisinand Patrick, and the bulk of the poem is contained in a second, morecommodious, arc of Oisin's account of his three-hundred-year quest.The larger arc is in a sort of shadow, the Fenians recalled by Oisin arenot only dead but of another era and their pagan religion of a HappyOtherworld is only an old man's reverie. The present reality in thepoem, the part in the light, as it were, is the smaller arc of Oisin's debatewith Patrick, in which the Christian view of mortal and immortal life isrepresented as dominant. This relation between the arc in shadow andthe arc in the light is described by Yeats in another context: "there is akind of day and night of religion . . . a period when the influences arethose that shape the world is followed by a period when the greaterpower is in influences that would lure the soul out of the world, out ofthe body. When Oisin is speaking with Saint Patrick of the friends andthe life he has outlived, he can but cry out constantly against a religionthat has no meaning for him." 16 The pagan conception of the Otherworld as an infinite extension of the sensuous pleasures of mortal life,contrasted with Christian idealism, is fundamental. The Otherworld isdifferent in only one vital aspect from the mortal world of the Fenians.It is immutable. And with this in mind, we may answer Ellmann's objection to what he sees as a divergence of symbolism and narrative:

Oisin ... is induced to leave Ireland behind and go to the three islands. But the threeislands, instead of being a refuge from life, are a symbolical representation of it. Oisin'snostalgia for the life he has left behind him is therefore inconsistent. Similarly, a powerfulcontrast which Yeats draws in the poem between Oisin and Patrick, as representatives ofpagan and Christian Ireland, seems irrelevant to the timeless portrait of life on the threeislands. I?

But Oisin's nostalgia is not, until the end, for mortal life in general butfor some particular aspect of it: on the Island of Dancing he remembersFenian battles and in consequence goes, not back to the Fenians, but tothe Island of Victories; there he remembers and desires the repose thathe formerly enjoyed among the Fenians and finds it again on the Islandof Forgetfulness. On the islands, three aspects of mortal life are immortally extended and separated into their pure forms; each perfected by theelimination of the two aspects incompatible with it. But, however goodin itself, no aspect of life made infinite and immutable can satisfy themortal Oisin. Fulfilment changes the object of desire, it does not eliminate desire itself. So at last, having tasted all possibilities of the Otherworld, Oisin is driven back to the world of time and change. And he is

16. Preface to Lady Gregory's Gods and Fighting Men (London, 1904), reprinted as "Gods andFighting Men" in Explorations (London, 1962), p. 24.

17. Richard EHmann, The Identity of Yeats, 2nd edn. (London, 1963), pp. 19-20.

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trapped in it with the knowledge, making him worse off than before,that there is no remedy for its ills, even in an Otherworld, that can alsopreserve all its excellencies simultaneously. This is the pagan and, inintent, tragic vision that Saint Patrick cannot shake. It is also the objection to paradise found in Wallace Stevens' "Sunday Morning."

Oisin's refusal to spend his last days in prayer, resigned to bodilydecrepitude, clearly follows from his pagan view of the Otherworld andthis one. Moreover, since in his mortal existence Oisin has passed fromyouth to old age without interval, he has lost too much bodily life already to deny himself the little that remains. In narrative terms, Oisin'sage is explained simply by the duration of his wild goose chase aftercontentment. Allegorically, however, it is not the duration of Oisin'sjourney but the experience itself that accounts for the transformation inthe poet and in his perception of the world.

This experience, which makes Oisin as old in wisdom as the race itself, is at one level symbolized by the natural process of the setting andrising of the sun, and its duration is the space of a symbolic night. Oisinleaves Ireland and arrives at the Island of Dancing at sunset, and it is in"the golden evening light" (p. 421)18 that he leaves the island; thesecond island is approached in the darkness of the night, the third instarlight, and Ireland, once more, at dawn. That each island has its ownrounds of day and night extends this symbolism spirally.

There is a related symbolism in the figures that Oisin sees on the wateras he and Niamh journey to each island:

and now a hornless deerPassed by us, chased by a phantom houndAll pearly white, save one red ear;And now the lady rode like the windWith an apple of gold in her tossing hand;And a beautiful young man followed behindWith a quenchless gaze and fluttering hair. (p. 413)

Yeats found these phantoms in Michael Comyn's "The Lay of Oisin onthe Land of Youth," 19 and they became potent figures not only in"Oisin" but also in the early conception of The Shadowy Waters. In theplay, they are the very shadows that indicate the division of the originalunity into light and dark, day and night. They presage the beginning oflife and desire, which arise from the division:

The shadows that before the world beganMade Tethra bow down on his hands and weepThe shadows of unappeasable desire:A red-eared hound that on the waters and winds

18. The page references given in parentheses after quotations from "The Wanderings of Oisin" areto Collected Poems.

19. Alspach, "Some Sources of Oisin," p. 852.

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Followed a whimpering fawn and boy that followedA girl that had an apple in her hand. 20

The notes Yeats wrote for The Wind Among the Reeds tells us moreabout these figures:

This hound and this deer seem plain images of the desire of the man "which is for thewoman," and "the desire of the woman which is for the desire of the man," and of alldesires which are as these. I have read them in this way in the "Wanderings of Usheen.". . . A solar mythologist would perhaps say that the girl with the golden apples was oncethe winter, or night, carrying the sun away, and the deer without horns . . . darkness flying the light. 2 1

Oisin's wisdom becomes complete when his own experience in the Otherworld brings the full understanding of the meaning of the phantoms. Attheir first appearance, Niamh refuses to explain them. She puts an endto Oisin's questions with "Vex them no longer" (p. 414), and a fingeron his lip. As Oisin and Niamh approach the second island, the phantoms appear again and this time Niamh distracts her lover's attentionfrom them with kisses and song. But when they appear in the third bookat the approach to the third island, the meaning of the phantoms can nolonger be hidden from Oisin:

And those that fled and that followed, from the foam-pale distance broke:The immortal desire of Immortals we saw in their faces, and sighed. (p. 431)

There is no need now for Oisin to question Niamh. With the experienceof the first two islands behind him his understanding is nearly complete.There can be no lasting contentment, for life is desire; and immortal lifeis the immortality of desire. The quest leads to the empty discovery thatthe longing, not the fulfilment, is the essence. There are many ways ofsaying it: "Love's pleasure drives his love away, "22 and, "Man is in loveand loves what vanishes,"23 are two of them. At The Hawk's Well reiterates the theme.

As the quest itself takes place between the going down and the risingof the sun, and the phantoms are a further expansion of the same symbolism, so Oisin can be seen as like the sun itself. "The flaming lion ofthe world" (p. 440), as Niamh calls him, is as obviously a solar figure asthe poet in several poems of The Green Helmet (most splendidly in"These are the Clouds").24 Oisin leaves Ireland in the west, at the beginning of his quest, and comes back to it "out of the sea as the dawncomes." Niamh, for her part, is described at her first appearance:

20. Druid Craft: The Writing of The Shadowy Waters, Mss. of W. B. Yeats transcribed, ed. and witha commentary by Michael J. Sidnell, George P. Mayhew and David R. Clark (Amherst, Mass., 1971),p. 174.

21. The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Peter AlIt and Russell K. Alspach (NewYork, 1957), p. 807.

22. "Two Songs from a Play," Collected Poems, p. 240.23. "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen," ibid., p. 234.24. The cluster of images of lion, fallen king and fallen sun (reminiscent of and partly influenced by

Richard II perhaps) make this a book of daylight, dejection and defiance in which Yeats is not unlikethe Oisin at the end of the earlier poem.

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A pearl-pale, high-born lady, who rodeOn a horse with a bridle of findrinny;And like a sunset were her lips,A stormy sunset on doomed ships;A citron colour gloomed in her hair,But down to her feet white vesture flowed,And with the glimmering crimson glowedOf many a figured embroidery;And it was bound with a pearl-pale shellThat wavered like the summer streams,As her soft bosom rose and fell. (pp. 409-10)

EHmann finds this description "better suited to one of Rossetti's womenthan to Oisin's ladY,"25 but this is not just Pre-Raphaelite portraiture.The associations of the moon mingling with sunset, the flowing andebbing of the tide on the seashore and the appearance of the clouds atevening are related to the figure of Niamh in much the same way asEliot's evening is to his "patient etherised upon a table," though not tothe same ironic effect.

When the Fianna are broken up at last, after hundreds of years of hunting, it is doubtfulthat Finn dies at all, and certain that he comes again in some other shape, and Oisin, hisson, is made king over a divine country. The birds and beasts that cross his path in thewoods have been fighting men or great enchanters or fair women, and in a moment cantake some beautiful or terrible shape. We think of him and of his people as great-bodiedmen with large movements, that seem, as it were, flowing out of some deep below the narrow stream of personal impulse, men that have broad brows and quiet eyes full of confidence in a good luck that proves every day afresh that they are a portion of the strengthof things. They are hardly so much individual men as portions of universal nature, like theclouds that shape themselves and reshape themselves momentarily, or like a bird betweentwo boughs, or like the gods that have given the apples and the nuts; and yet this butbrings them the nearer to us, for we can remake them in our image when we will. 26

Oisin is not a sun-god and Niamh is not a moon-goddess; though thelovers are constantly associated with sun and moon, it is usually throughsimile. So Niamh, not being the moon, hurries Oisin to the place whereshe "would be when the white moon climbs, / The red sun falls and theworld grows dim" (p. 413).27 As we have seen from the notes to TheWind Among the Reeds, Yeats thought of the symbolism of sun andmoon as inherent in the story he was retelling, and in this symbolismYeats discovered aesthetic implications:

Old writers had an admirable symbolism that attributed certain energies to the influenceof the sun, and certain others to lunar influences.... I myself imagine a marriage of thesun and the moon in the arts I take most pleasure in; and now bride and bridegroom butexchange, as it were, full cups of gold and silver, and now they are one in a mysticalembrace . . . in supreme art . . . there is the influence of the sun (as well as the moon)

25. The Man and the Masks, p. 137.26. "Gods and Fighting Men," Explorations, p. 18.27. These lines and another similar one were added in 1895 with the intent, it appears, of strengthen

ing the symbolism of sun and moon. See Variorum Poems, p. 9,11. 102-105, and p. 12,1. 152. MortonSeiden sees Oisin as sun-god, Niamh as moon-goddess and the demon as "the sun in its evening or winter aspect." William Butler Yeats: The Poet as a Mythmaker (East Lansing, Michigan, 1962), p. 226n.

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. . . and the sun brings with it not merely discipline but joy; for its discipline is not of thekind the multitudes impose upon us by their weight and pressure, but the expression of theindividual soul turning itself into a pure fire and imposing its own pattern. . . . When wehave drunk the cold cup of the moon's intoxication, we thirst for something beyondourselves. . . . 28

Yeats's distinction between solar and lunar influences is the mainfeature in the symbolic structure of "The Wanderings of Oisin." At thebeginning and the end of the poem we see the poet in the mortal worldand in his solar aspect. The world of the greater part of the poem hasimmortal, supernatural and lunar associations. The exploration of thesecond, lunar, world is the record of a poet's quest for something beyond himself or, as he might have said later, an antithetical self.

Yeats identified himself with Oisin and it is not difficult to reverse theprocess to some extent and to see the three islands not only as stages in apoet's progress but as phases of Yeats's early career in particular. However, Ellmann's association of Sligo, London and Howth periods ofYeats's youth with the three islands is much too closely biographicaland, in the case of the second book, it carries the implication of a monstrous inflation of a boyhood experience. 29

The allegory of the first book is straightforward. On the Island ofDancing, Oisin experiences a youthful and sublime harmony withnature. Aengus's house of "wattles, clay and skin" (p. 417)30 reminds usthat this place draws its scenery largely from Slish Wood and Lough Gilland has literary associations with Walden Pond. The shells on the shoresymbolize, as elsewhere in Yeats's early poetry, introspection; and to asimilar effect the birds in the trees ponder "in a soft vain mood / Upontheir shadows in the tide" (p. 415). With their "melting hues," theshells, and with their "rainbow light," the birds express a passive andindolent harmony. The more active harmony of art and nature is signified by the graceful boats of the immortals, which have

carven figures on their prowsOf bitterns, and fish-eating stoats,And swans with their exultant throats. (p. 415)

The allegory of youthful ecstasy is expressed through rhythm, symboland statement. Aengus apprises Oisin of the essential principle of theEver-Young, that "joy is God and God is joy" (p. 418). His peopleembody it. They rejoice in the limitless possibilities of natural good andperfect freedom. This allegorical dream is of the natural world freedfrom the conditions of time and change. On the Island of Dancing, no"kingfisher turns to a ball of dust" (p. 422). But Oisin, as poet, cannotexpress such a world. When he sings of "human joy," his hearers weepand snatch his harp away. The poet, it appears, cannot escape his

28. Ibid., pp. 24-26.29. The Man and the Masks, p. 51.30. In 1888, the house was made of "antlers and shaggy skin." See Variorum Poems, p. 17,1. 249.

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mortal sadness, a condition personified as "the grey wandering ospreySorrow" (p. 418). Without it, one might say, there would be no poetry,merely rhythm. The figure of the predatory osprey, or sea-hawk, functions by contrast with the other birds on the island and suggests alsoOisin's longing for the exhilaration of battle.

The youthful period ends and the poet continues his quest for somestate that will satisfy his mortal nature, seeking now for danger, uncertainty and the self-assertion "equal to good or grievous chance" (p. 421)that they call forth. So he proceeds to the Island of Victories.

The second book is the most obscure. After he had written it, Yeatsfeared that he might have been "like the people who dream some wonderful thing and get up in the middle of the night and write it and findnext day only scribbling on the paper." It was the most inspired andpoetic (though not the most artistic) part of the poem, he thought, "akind of vision." The writing of it left him exhausted. 31

In part, the allegory of each book works by a set of contrasts with theothers. So on the approach to the second island the sea is no longersmooth and clear, but turbulent; and Niamh's song, which had beensweet and comforting on the way to the first island, is now sensual andexhilarating. But when she sings of the marriages of fairies with men,which were possible in ancient times, "before God was," tears troubleher song. We are in an historical middle age, in which the regulation ofdivine and natural laws have broken up the old freedoms. And in asmaller figure we have an individual middle age, with its ambition,struggles, choices, strength and sensuality. There are, of course,"middle ages" to every period of life, not just in the one life-span.

More than half the second book is a prelude to its main action,Oisin's battles with the demon, and for a moment I pass over theprelude to tackle interpretatively the demon himself. When, after anight of waiting, the demon still has not appeared to Oisin, Oisin seekshim out, and a figure more pathetic than fearsome is discovered:

on a dim plainA little runnel made a bubbling strain,And on the runnel's stony and bare edgeA dusky demon dryas withered sedgeSwayed, crooning to himself in unknown tongue:In a sad revelry he sang and swungBacchant and mournful, passing to and froHis hand along the runnel's side, as thoughThe flowers still grew there.... (p. 428)

This dried-up, self-contradictory little demon, pretending, or sufferingthe delusion, that he is still tending a living garden, talking to himself ina private language, is inescapably a critic or scholar-as seen of courseby a poet. The runnel or stream in this passage symbolizes, as elsewhere

31. Wade, Letters, p. 87.

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in Yeats,32 fertility and creativity. The barrenness of the demon's littlewaste-land, not being attributable to lack of water, seems to be due tothe ministrations of the demon himself. Yeats stated the condition ofwhich the description of the demon is an allegorical elaboration, as Iread it, in an essay of 1886: "If Ireland has produced no great poet, it isnot that her poetic impulse has run dry, but because her critics havefailed her. . . . 33 The essay goes on to mount a vigorous and rathernasty attack on Professor Dowden, who, it is variously implied orstated, had been too concerned for his professorial emolument, tooWest-Britonish, too unpatriotic, too selfish and indifferent to encourageSir Samuel Ferguson, and who was therefore responsible for the latter'sfailure to live up to his promise as an Irish poet. Poor Dowden becomesthe epitome of the Irish critic, characterized as possessing tact, industryand judgement but no convictions; one who keeps his "ears to theground listening to the faintest echo of English thought." With thesuperb pomposity of youth, Yeats rounds on his chosen antagonist: "Itis a question whether the most distinguished of our critics, ProfessorDowden, would not only have more consulted the interests of hiscountry, but more also, in the long run, his own dignity and reputation,which are dear to all Irishmen, and if he had devoted some of thoseelaborate pages which he has spent on the much bewritten George Eliot,to a man like the subject of this article."34 In Autobiographies, theattack on Dowden is more subtle and more damaging, with Yeats usinghis father's disparagements as both sword and shield. In the pattern ofthat work, Dowden and O'Leary are presented as contraries: the first aprovincial, discouraging and narrow personality; the second an Irishman of generous sympathies and noble mind.

Dowden was probably the original on which the allegorical caricaturewas based and, though it is only necessary to the allegory that thedemon should be some figure similar to the Dowden portrayed elsewhere, the particular correspondence can be pursued further. Like thedemon in the poem, Dowden in Autobiographies is described as "withering in barren soil."35 Dowden "seemed to condescend to everybodyand everything,"36 an attitude for which the demon's transformationinto a massive fir tree would be an appropriate figure. Another of thedemon's forms, that of "a drowned dripping body" (p. 428),37 evokes aresponse which has something in common with the effect upon Yeats ofDowden's admission that he completed his book on Shelley for the sakeof an old promise, though he had lost his liking for the subject. That

32. "Ancestral Houses" and "Easter 1916," Collected Poems, pp. 225, 202, come immediately tomind.

33. "The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson," Dublin University Review, Nov. 1886, p. 923; rpt. in Un-collected Prose by W. B. Yeats, collected and ed. by John P. Frayne, I (London, 1970), 88.

34. Ibid., p. 924; Frayne, pp. 88-89.35. Autobiographies (London, 1955), p. 235.36. Ibid., p. 87.37. Originally "a nine days' corpse." See Variorum Poems, p. 40, 1. 179.

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revelation "chilled" the young Yeats, and the book itself betrayed itsauthor as "a conscientious man hiding from himself a lack of sympathy." 38 The very idea of the demon's transformations may owe something to Yeats's view of Dowden as a man who adopted "a professionalpose," 39 and who would not trust his nature. 40 The demon is a cold oneand Dowden's emotional nature was deficient too; he "believed toomuch in the intellect," said J. B. Yeats. 41 And if we inquire into thedemon's detached attitude to the lady he holds captive, that too hassomething in common with Yeats's idea of Dowden as a repressed sensualist who "confessed ... that he would have wished before all thingsto have been the lover of many women. "42 But whatever the relationshipbetween Yeats's Dowden and his demon, the perceptions that went intothe two characterizations were surely related.

To return to the beginning of the second book and the castle, with itselaborately symbolic architecture, in which the demon lives. EHmannsees its "dark towers" (p. 423) as a "symbolical England seen throughIrish eyes," and the demon and the lady as "the symbolic portrayal ofEnglish oppression of Ireland. "43 The demon and the castle in this interpretation have the same allegorical function, and there are other objections to it. One of them is that Manannan, the Celtic sea-god "whoreigned over the country of the dead, "44 originally built the castle for hissubjects, a "mightier race" (p. 427) which has vanished along with Manannan himself. A relic of an age long preceding the Christian dispensation with its "milk-pale face / Under a crown of thorns and dark withblood" (p. 427) (as Oisin notes in an aside to Saint Patrick), it is alsoolder than the heroic age. The castle dates from a time "when gods andgiants warred" (p. 424) and beyond that, one of the statues flanking itsgreat stairway has been in existence "Since God made Time and Deathand Sleep" (p. 424). The castle has clear Fomorian associations (primarily through Manannan himself but also through "death and dismay andcold and darkness")45 and in his assault on it, Oisin (who enters thecastle to "the flashing beat / Of Danaan hooves" in the first version)46is continuing the battle that has been fought since the beginning of theworld:

I suggest that the battle between the tribes of the goddess Danu, the powers of light, andwarmth, and fruitfulness, and goodness, and the Fomor, the powers of darkness, andcold, and barrenness, and badness upon the Towery Plain, was the establishment of thehabitable world, the rout of the ancestral darkness; that the battle among the Sidhe forthe harvest is the annual battle of summer and winter; that the battle among the Sidhe at a

38. Autobiographies, p. 87.39. Ibid., p. 95.40. Ibid., p. 86.41. Ibid.42. Ibid., p. 235.43. The Man and the Masks, p. 51.44. See Variorum Poems, p. 808.45. Ibid.46. Ibid., p. 31, 1. 31.

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man's death is the battle of life and death; and that the battle of the Black Pig is the battlebetween the manifest world and the ancestral darkness at the end of all things; and that allthese battles are one, the battle of all things with shadowy decay. 47

At the end of the second book, we hear the demon's song of decay:

I hear my soul drop down into decay,And Manannan's dark tower, stone after stone,Gather sea-slime and fall the seaward way,And the moon goad the waters night and day,That all be overthrown. (pp. 430-31)

Oisin against the demon, light against dark, Danaan against Fomorian,poet against critic, even Yeats against Dowden-all the battles are one.

At the entrance to the castle, Oisin and Niamh pass between pillars,the contraries that uphold the world, perhaps, as the pillars are in thesymbolism of the Order of the Golden Dawn; in Regardie's account:

the eternal balance of light and darknesswhich gives force to visible nature. 48

They also pass between two statues which seem to represent the eternaland the temporal, ideal and actual, spiritual and physical or all suchantinomies. 49 At first the only light comes from the "surgingphosphorus" (p. 424) stirred up by their feet (p. 427)-perhaps the lightof experience-and as they proceed, moonlight (imagination?), a torchand the sword of Manannan, both weapon and a light, further repel thedarkness. The torch and Manannan's sword of light are brought toOisin by the lady he releases.

The lady is heard before she is seen, singing of her brothers (at home,with her sisters, "in ancient Eri" explicitly in the first version and implicitly in the same place in later ones). 50 The appearance of this Irishlady is characterized by faint and sickly light, "funeral tapers" and"moonlit vapours" (p. 425). The demon has chained her to two oldeagles and she has lost all hope of deliverance. The lady is clearly,though feebly, on the side of light. The torch that she brings to Oisinafter her release is, I suggest, inspiration; Man-annan's sword of light,Irish tradition; and she herself the Muse in her Irish form bound in thechains of a Dowdenish contempt for Irish subject-matter in poetry. Andfor these suggestions, I offer the persuasion that they cohere in an intelligible allegory and are partly traditional poetic properties. As for theeagles with "their dim minds ... on ancient things," they are like theeagle in P. W. Joyce's version of the "Voyage of Maildun,"51 except intheir failure to renew their youth. Perhaps this difference indicates thesignificance of the lady's chains: there is an Irish Muse, but she is

47. Variorum Poems, p. 810.48. Israel Regardie, The Golden Dawn (Chicago, 1937), I, 110.49. The Man and the Masks, p. 52.50. Variorum Poems, p. 32, 11. 5Oc-50e.51. P. W. Joyce, Old Celtic Romances (London, 1879; rpt. Dublin, 1966), pp. 110-13.

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thought of as belonging wholly to the past until Oisin, like Yeats in theFerguson essay, comes to liberate her.

The great hall of the castle to which Oisin, Niamh and the lady comeis a high-domed "multitudinous home of faces" (p. 428). The facescarved in the stone represent, perhaps, the great predecessors whomOisin aspires to emulate when he puts himself to the test of the fightwith the demon. He waits under the gaze of the past, the immensity ofhis aspiration symbolized by the sea-gull "under the roof" (p. 426),drifting so high that Oisin's shout cannot reach it. The perfect whitenessof the bird suggests the appropriate Danaan associations. 52 It is appropriate too, in view of the meanness of the character and proportions,that the demon should be found behind "the least of doors" and outside this great hall of tradition.

Between the battles in which Oisin is always victorious but the demonnever defeated, the hero is tended by both Muse and fairy mistress, hisspirit and his body sustained by "wine and meat and bread" (p. 429).The battles continue until a beech bough reminds Oisin of tranquil moments with his father "white-haired Finn / Under a beech at Almhuin . . ." (p. 430). Then Oisin and Niamh depart for the last island,leaving indeterminate the final fate of the liberated but not repatriatedMuse.

The sea surrounding the third island is so foaming and misty with"milky smoke" (p. 431) that it obscures the world. And on the island vision and thought are diffused; it is a magic, vaguely mystical world. Thethick wood that the couple passes through has none of the vibrantrhythmical life of the trees on the first island but is lifeless. The treeswhich blot out all detail are those sacred to the ancient druids, hazel andoak. Through the dark portal of this gloomy wood Oisin and Niamhenter the valley of the sleepers.

As the first island suggested youthful life lived wholly for the presentand the second a middle age full of the sense of the past, so the thirddwells on futurity and age. The skies, like the trees are "dew-cumbered"(p. 434), seeming to presage as in "The Valley of the Black Pig," themoment just before the extinction of the world. In the allegory of thepoet's quest, this third book represents a phase in which magic and visions become the chief preoccupation.

Alspach saw the sleepers as "the heroic dead of Ireland," 53 butYeats's figures do not have the same kind of meaning as those in thesources from which he probably derived them. The weapons of thesleepers are something more than works of art, "more comely than mencan make them" (p. 433). The sleepers have a beauty that has not beenseen "since the world began" (p. 435) and possess the peculiarities ofhuge bulk, the claws of birds instead of hands and feathered ears. This

52. See Yeats's note after the title of "The White Birds," Variorum Poems, p. 121.53. Alspach, "Some Sources of Oisin," p. 862.

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last feature they share with "The King that could make his people stare,/ Because he has feathers instead of hair"54-the hero of the story "TheWisdom of the King,"55 whose feathers betoken his supernatural kinship and wisdom.

The key to the symbolic meaning of the sleepers lies in the claw of oneof them, "a branch soft-shining with bells" (p. 434). This same bellbranch in the poem "The Dedication to a Book of Stories ... "56 is thenarcotic which eases but does not cure evil and distracts men from ordinary business and high designs alike. Through the medium of this bellbranch, "sleep's forebear" (p. 435)-that is to say, day-dreaming-Oisinjoins the company of sleepers. He has passed into a state of reverie andjoined, as I interpret, a visionary company who are the phantasmagoriaof his longings for beauty, heroism and greatness; conceptions whichlike beauty in "The Rose of the World"57 preexist the created beingswho in succession embody, or try to embody them.

So Oisin spends a hundred years in which Fenians and heroes of theRed Branch become a confusion of contemporaries. The dreams areshadows without substance, inactivity confused with activity: "So livedI and lived not, so wrought I and wrought not with creatures ofdreams" (p. 438). Oisin here is like the Kevin of The Countess Kathleen:

Alone in the hushed passion of romance,His mind ran all on sheogues, and on talesOf Finian labours and the Red-branch kings,And he cared nothing for the life of man. 58

And both Oisin, here, and Kevin are self-portraits of the artist asdreamer.

There are times when Oisin half wakes from his magical sleep, indications of the approach of dawn on one level and of the intrusion of thereal world on the dreamer on another. Finally, ending the hundred yearsof sleep, the exhausted starling reminds Oisin of the Fenians setting outat dawn for the day's hunting and he is moved to action. This time thehorse that has borne Oisin on his journey appears unsummoned, for itknows that "the ancient sadness of man" (p. 439) is moving again inOisin's bosom and that the questing poet, at the end of his dreams, mustgo back to where all such aspirations start.

The horse is no doubt from the stable of Manannan, one of thosewhich "could cross the land as easily as the sea," and "are constantlyassociated with the waves."59 And he is a kind of Pegasus (who was alsobegotten, be it remembered, at the springs of Ocean and by the sea-god

54. "Alternative Song for the Severed Head in The King of the Great Clock Tower," CollectedPoems, p. 325.

55. Rpt. in Mythologies (London, 1959), pp. 165-70.56. Collected Poems, p. 51.57. Ibid., p. 41.58. The Variorum Edition of the Plays of w. B. Yeats, ed. Russell K. Alspach (London, 1964)", p. 134.59. Variorum Poems, p. 808.

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Poseidon, Manannan's Greek cousin), the supernatural power thatcarries Oisin to the completion of his quest. Yeats rejected, in the writing of "Oisin" an "elaborate metaphor of a breaking wave, intended toprove that all life rose and fell as in (the) poem,"60 but the white horsesymbolizes some such impulse.

So the dawn comes round, and with it the resumption of ordinary life.One of the most successful passages in the poem describes Oisin's arrivalin Ireland. After the dew-sodden, drab and lifeless Island of Forgetfulness, the sensuous richness of mortal nature expunges all Oisin's regretat leaving Niamh:

Till, fattening, the winds of the morning, an odour of new-mown hayCame and my forehead fell low, and my tears like berries fell down. (p. 442)

But when Oisin learns that the old pagan and heroic times have disappeared during his absence and when he sees the degenerate products ofthe Christian dispensation, he longs again for Niamh. That is to put thematter in its narrative context; in the context of symbol and allegory, itshould be expressed in another way: "The desire of the woman, theflying darkness, it is all one! The image-a cross, a man preaching inthe wilderness, a dancing Salome, a lily in a girl's hand, a flame leaping,a globe with wings, a pale sunset over still waters-is an eternal act; butour understandings are temporal and understand but a little at atime. "61 As three dreams of a single night or as a three-hundred-yearhistory, it is all one; in the poet's eyes the world is transformed and he isready now to leave mortality for good. But the act of contempt (helpingthe mortals with their sacks of sand-their burden of time-consciousness) fixes him in the world he despises. What is the poet to do? To proclaim with useless defiance a view of the world, and of Ireland in particular, that is romantic, pessimistic, unchristian and, in a sense thatO'Leary would have approved, Fenian: "I will go to the Fenians be theyat flame or at feast."

University of TorontoCanada

60. "From Wheels and Butterflies," rpt. in Explorations, pp. 392-93.61. Variorum Poems, p. 807.

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the allegory of yeats's 'the wanderings of oisin

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